The Piano           

Esa Jaske Gallery, Sydney

2006

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To allude to modernist engineering, the 6’8 grand piano is built to scale from sheet aluminium with rivets that fasten each section into place. Bridges, towers, cranes, cities and vehicles pertain to the same qualities, and they are made of the same stuff. Strictly engineered and fabricated to withstand time, to last.  

 

The challenge was to build a piano. The absence of the instrument’s mechanics renders it mute. Devoid of its sound board, peddles and keys, The Piano is disempowered, a hollow skeletal structure. The Piano sits silently without musical accompaniment.

 

But the shape of the grand piano with its curves and suspended lyre made it instantly recognisable; its place in history defied a new rendering. It remained an archetypal instrument of refined sensuous feminine beauty.

 

Aluminium and industrial rivets, Scale 1:1 of a 6’8 grand piano.